[j-nsp] EX4550 or QFX5100 for Core

[Richard McGovern]

I would highly recommend going with QFX5110 instead of QFX5100 – same everything but QFX5110 offers L3 VXLAN which QFX5100 does not.  I know you do not need this today, but down the road who knows.  EVPN/VXLAN appears to be the new architecture for most networks, plus QFX5110 has QSFP28 interfaces to support 40 and 100, while QFX5100 has only QSFP+ to support 40GE.  For both products, the 40GE can be channelized into 4 x 10GE.

I would NOT go with EX4550.  Yes, do NOT run 15.1 (Rx-Sy) on any legacy EX product.  Just stay with 12.3 and you’ll very likely be much happier.

One other reason, I believe, is that price of QFX5110 is less than both QFX5100/EX4550.

You’ll want to run 15.1X53-D[latest] on your QFX5110, unless you are using EVPN/VXLAN, and then 17.3R3, I think is best, or maybe some 18.x.  I would not consider 16.x or 17.x for any EX or QFX usage, outside of EX92xx.

Not sure who your Juniper partner or sales team are, but I would think they should/would tell you the same thing.

Good luck


On 8/6/18, 7:54 AM, "Mark Tinka" <mark.tinka at seacom.mu> wrote:

    
    
    On 3/Aug/18 16:39, Giovanni Bellac via juniper-nsp wrote:
    
    >
    > We want to keep simplicity in and therefore want to use VC. We are pushing some Gbit/s from Rack-to-Rack (backups) and to our two upstreams around 500-600Mbit/s.
    > QFX5100 hardware seems to be MUCH better than EX4550 hardware. The ARP table size, hash table size etc. on EX4550 is relatively small.
    
    Watch out for small buffers (4MB shared) on the EX4550.
    
    Mark.